pigeons – Page 2 – derrickjknight

Natural Monochrome

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Anyone having followed the broadband connection saga will no doubt share my delight in the fact that this morning I uploaded the ten following pictures in five minutes. Until James Peacock flew in to the rescue any one image would take far longer than that.

The Needles foghorn reverberated around Downton this morning, as sea mist combined with low sun to produce beautiful monochrome garden scenes. Silent pigeons in the trees were unfazed by this.

The final picture is of Christchurch Road, showing the murky driving conditions.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAh25F5jdOc&w=560&h=315]

Incidentally, peacocks can fly, albeit no great distance.

Throughout the day, Jackie worked on the Christmas decorations. She finished the tree, but this is only the start of the festooning. In the last of these photographs I chose to focus on the reflected image of our wedding photograph from 1968 lit by Giles’s stained glass lamp.

This evening we dined on Carbonara pasta topped with bacon and served with broccoli and cauliflower florets. Jackie drank Hoegaarden and I drank Collin-Bourriset Fleurie 2015.

Lunch On The Green

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This morning was spent helping the garden recover from the battering winds. This involved gathering up broken branches; tying up plants, like the rose Summer Wine, that had come adrift; a certain amount of watering; and preparing ground for chrysanthemums and bulbs.

After lunch we deposited another orange bag of cuttings in the recycling centre, and drove along the coast road to Milton on Sea.

When the sun emerged from the rapidly moving clouds The Isle of Wight and The Needles benefited from a bright clear light.

Waves still rolled thunderously onto the rocks at the water’s edge.

The clifftop had experienced more erosion since my last venture up there a few months ago.

The bricks in the foreground of this image once formed part of a long-gone structure,

and the path shown here was set further away from the edge last year.

We may have finished our lunch, but a gentleman seated on a bench, mirrored by another eating a banana in his cab,

was still enjoying his.

On the village green a group of elderly cyclists tucked into their own snacks.

I am occasionally asked about the safety of the free roaming animals. Continuing to the north of the forest we noticed this hit and run sign beside Roger Penny Way – not that unusual a phenomenon, particularly during the tourist season.

Were I ever to take it into my head to climb a tree again, I might choose this one bearing useful bracket fungus

at the side of a somewhat waterlogged lane through farmland just to the north of Cadnam,

where sheep wandered across the road.

Initially inquisitive, these creatures, when I invaded too much of their space, turned tail and made for the field from which they had wandered.

We were soon aware of a golf course on our left. A putting session was in progress.

On our return home, I photographed the Hordle Lane housing development from the rear.

This evening we dined on Jackie’s luscious liver casserole, mashed potato, green beans, and orange carrots. The Culinary Queen drank Hoegaarden, and I finished the Fleurie.

Early Morning Lovemaking

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Now, please don’t get too excited. It’s birds I’m referring to. Pigeons, to be precise.

I am no good at sexing birds, so I’m not sure which was which in this couple, although I suspect that it was the female who remained aloof whilst her suitor performed on the trapeze.

Not greatly impressed, she turned and flew away. He swivelled on the high wire and set off in pursuit.

Jackie continued her mammoth weeding and planting in the garden.

My contribution was digging out bamboo roots that had strayed into the gravel of the Oval Path. This also involved lifting border rocks and replacing them after removing the interlopers. Afterwards I ambled around with watering cans, and, of course, a camera.

We are daily enjoying new tulips,

including these parrots.

We inherited some prolific yellow wallflowers along the back drive.

Encouraged by them Jackie added these beautifully red-veined ones last year,

and these varicoloured erysimum Red Jeps quite recently.

Another recent planting is mesembryanthemums,

seen here in situ beyond the russet heuchera.

It was so hot this afternoon that we took cold drinks on the Castle Bench because it was in the shade. There is a little table each side of the seat for drinks. Jackie sat on the right. I sat on the left. She is left-handed. I am right-handed. Work it out. Until she twigged what was going on, we both rested our glasses in the middle of the bench. Then we swapped positions, and there was nothing between us.

This evening we dine on Jackie’s delicious sausage casserole, carrots, cauliflower, and new potatoes. She drank Hoegaarden and I finished the fleurie.

Wiltshire And The West End

Steady rain fell most of the day, so I scanned some more colour slides for posterity. The more observant readers will note that I have converted three to black and white images.

19th December 1979 was Matthew’s eleventh birthday. Being the generous soul he is, he allowed Becky to blow out his cake candles. I had to be quick to take this shot because these flickering flames were my only source of light.

Just before Christmas Jessica, Michael and I took a trip to Jessica’s parents in Wiltshire.

This standing stone must have been photographed at Avebury,

above which Jessica and Piper romped on the hillside.

Mat and Becky always enjoyed a trip to Trafalgar Square. In December 1979 you were still welcome to feed the birds with crusts of bread,

which, like the rooks foraging in the turf beneath our New Forest ponies, tried their luck around the sculptured hoofs of King George IV’s horse.

Lord Nelson’s memorial square is a very short walk from what was our flat in Horse and Dolphin Yard, in the doorway of which beam Jessica and Michael.

This Mews Yard lay off Macclesfield Street, between Gerard Street and Shaftesbury Avenue leading to

Piccadilly Circus, photographed in January 1980.

Jackie has abandoned me this evening for a trip to Surrey and a meal with her good friend, Pauline, which they have both been looking forward to. I therefore dined alone on fried eggs, bacon, potatoes, and carrots, with toast. I have never tried the orange vegetables with a fry-up before. They add a certain pleasant piquancy.

A Walk In The Park

Although my virus has definitely improved, it is still taking a while to clear my head, so, when I set out this morning to scan another batch of Elizabeth’s returned prints, I couldn’t face sorting them, so, instead, scanned a group of carefully catalogued colour slides from March 1973.

On a walk in Westminster’s St James’s Park I made some pictures

of the view looking west from the blue bridge, decades before the London Eye was to dominate the horizon;

of briskly striding wrapped-up walkers, with Westminster Abbey in the background;

and of perching pigeons and other passers-by.

Against the background of the apple tree that featured in Becky’s Book, I photographed

Matthew.

and Becky.

This afternoon Helen, Bill, Shelley, and Ron came fro a late lunch which extended into the evening, when we watched the first day’s highlights of the final Oval Test Match.

Jackie offered a choice of excellent meals well up to her usual standard. There was a tender beef casserole, mashed potato and swede, with crisp carrots and green beans; and there was choice chilli con carne with superb savoury rice. I enjoyed small portions of each. Desserts were lemon tart, profiteroles, and forest fruits strudel. We could take our picks. Assorted red and white wines were imbibed.

Australia, finishing on 287 for 3, had a better day in the cricket.

Clapham Common

It was a bright and sunny day for my visit to old friends Wolf and Luci. Jackie, as usual drove me to and from New Milton Station for the train to Waterloo. From the terminal, I took the Northern Line to Clapham Common, along the South Side of which I walked, crossing over to Elms Road, right into Abbeville Road, and left into Hambalt Road to their home. I returned home by the same methods.
Maple leaves were falling on the common where work forces were engaged in clearing them up, mostly with extended ‘big hands’ to aid the process. Blue pigment on a particularly gnarled trunk produced an interesting abstract painting.
Pigeons, rooks, and Canada geese scratched about in well clawed soil, and Bullfrogs overlooked the redundant cattle trough, now planted with flowers.
Also apparently redundant, certainly unusable, is the drinking fountain provided by The United Kingdom Temperance and General Provident Association. This grand sculptured structure, even if it were functioning as it did in Victorian times, would probably be eschewed by the various gentlemen occupying the benches as they glugged alcoholic beverages straight from their cans. The lions embellishing each side would probably never again have their thirsts slaked by the blocked and rusting fountain.
When I lived or worked in London I had enjoyed a monthly lunch with my friends. Unfortunately this frequency is no longer possible but whenever Jackie and I see them it is equally pleasurable, as it was today. Today Luci produced a tender lamb casserole, wild rice, parsnips, and brussels sprouts, followed by her trademark flavoursome crustless pumpkin pie. She and I both drank Wolf Blass red wine, while Wolf drank his customary apple juice.
Luci wrapped up a helping of the dessert for Jackie, who enjoyed it as much as I did. After that superb lunch, I didn’t join my lady for dinner.
On my return home I was greeted by an e-mail from Luci containing very good photographs of Wolf and me taken with her Samsung mobile phone.

From Erotic To Gothic

Having admired Mario Vargas Llosa’s epic tale , The War of The End of The World’, I decided to embark upon another of his works. This time I chose a slighter book, the elegant and gentle piece of erotica ‘In Praise of the Stepmother’. Very well written, the tale was ultimately a considerable disappointment. The first book had contained a few indications of the writer’s fascination with sexual love, but the more violent descriptions seemed the less remarkable in the context of a savage war.
The second book, cleverly links the narrative with famous paintings, such as Titian’s Venus with Cupid and Music’. The novel features an inappropriate relationship between a forty year old woman and her stepson, in which the small boy emerges as the scheming initiator. The disappointment is that the child is presented as possessing the control. In any such relationship it is the adult who is misusing power. Given the focus on historic child abuse in recent years in this country, I wonder how Faber’s 1991 publication would be received today.
I finished reading the book this morning, before taking my usual Hordle Cliff beach walk in reverse.
As the leaves fall from the trees, the rooks will soon be returning to their nesting area, but at the moment that is occupied by pigeons.
The chalet demolition in Shorefield Country Park continues apace.
Although the morning was drier and brighter than yesterday, strong winds roared across the Solent, bringing waves crashing on the shingle, and bending the ornamental grasses growing beside the steps descending from the cliff top. Sunlight set autumn leaves ablaze and threaded its way through The Needles.
Our winter flowering clematis Cirrhosa is displaying the freckles by which it is known.
I was fortunate to avoid much of the rain this morning. The afternoon was rather wetter. Having recently watched Andrew Graham-Dixon’s BBC4 programme, ‘The Art of Gothic’, I was inspired to read Horace Walpole’s ‘The Castle of Otranto’, described as the first Gothic novel. I read Devendra P. Varma’s introduction to my Folio Society edition this afternoon.
Jackie’s recent sausage casserole has, with the addition of slabs of beef and a little more bacon, has become a mixed grill stew. And delicious it was too, as we dined on it, with roast potatoes and boiled carrots and runner beans, this evening. My choice from the array of desserts was tiramisu. Jackie drank Hoegaarden and I drank Castillo san Lorenzo reserva rioja 2009. Flo just ate her dinner.

‘Good Haircut’

Yesterday I promised Richard a copy of the photograph of him shovelling shingle. I printed it A3+ size today, and am very pleased with it.
Jackie drove me to Southampton Parkway after lunch. I then took my usual route to Carol’s, involving a train to Waterloo and a walk across Westminster Bridge and down Victoria Street.
On the south side of the River Thames The London Dungeon drew its usual crowds. At the top of the entrance steps stands a barrow loaded with human corpses wrapped in sacking. The occasional hand escaping from its primitive body-bag no longer twitched, unlike those of a visitor anxious to venture inside to feast her eyes on further gruesome spectacles. Perhaps the dead bodies had once entered with rather more trepidation.
Rainclouds gathered above Westminster Bridge and the silhouettes of some of the most photographed buildings in the world.
Flocks of pigeons lazing and foraging in a now much reduced little green at the Victoria Street end of Broadway, suddenly disturbed, periodically took flight and arranged themselves on safe perches in the plane trees above.
The green is Christchurch Gardens which has a history probably unknown to the millions passing by. There is no surviving evidence of either of the two chapels or the Church of Christ Church Broadway which have stood on the site at different times.
A chapel dedicated to St Mary Magdalene had occupied the area then known as Tothill Fields as early as the 13th century. By 1598, according to John Stowe, the building was ‘now wholly ruined’.
A new churchyard of St Margaret’s, known as The New Chapel was consecrated by the Dean of Westminster in December 1626. During the Commonwealth period it was used as a stable by Parliamentary soldiers and as avail for Scots prisoners captured at the Battle of Worcester. Twelve hundred of these prisoners were said to have died and been interred in the fields.
In the 19th century the New Chapel was demolished and replaced by Christ Church Broadway. Less than 100 years later, this in turn was destroyed by German incendiary bombs in the early morning of 17th April 1941.
Sadly, as in many London public spaces, this one now bears a sign telling you what you can’t do in them.
On one corner is situated a tribute to those who suffered in the suffragette movement which fought for votes for women in the early twentieth century. The body of their leader, Emmeline Pankhurst, is buried in Brompton Cemetery. Her gravestone in the form of a celtic cross features in ‘The Magnificent Seven’.
After visiting Carol, I returned to Southampton where Jackie was waiting to drive me home.
Noticing my reflection in the window of the 507 bus to Waterloo as it passed St. Thomas’s Hospital, I was reminded of the keen observation skills of Jackie and Judith Munns in August 2012. I had posted a photograph of the Sigoules boulangerie on an afternoon following a morning visit to the hairdressers there. ‘Good haircut’, Jackie had texted from England. How, I wondered, had she known? The answer was that I was unwittingly reflected in the baker’s window.
On the return train journey, I amused my fellow travellers, most of whom were engrossed in laptops, by commenting that ‘when I commuted everyone read books’. ‘Times have changed’, was a young woman’s smiling reply.
When we arrived home we dined on superb sausage casserole (recipe); green beans; orange carrots; red cabbage with chillies; and yellow swede, potato, and onion mash.

Contrasting Skies

In January 1964 I took four colour slide photographs of birds being fed at the Tower of London. The best of these has been lost. I had used it to produce a calendar for Mum a year or so later. Sadly, of the twelve pictures selected for that present, this is the only one that has sunk without trace. Two others are just not good enough for my eye which is far more discerning now than it was then. If you have just one or two of something in a collection, maybe you are more likely to retain what would be better thrown away. If you have thousands amassed over fifty years, you don’t mind creating a few gaps. These two are now in the bin.

This is the one that, with a considerable amount of retouching, survived for my posterity collection. It is feeding time for the gulls and pigeons that no doubt still gather to snap up the offerings of those generous souls giving up their lunch hours to line the railings and toss bread for the birds as yesterday’s Ibsley woman tossed carrots for the ponies. I fondly speculate that I still occasionally photograph descendants of these very avian symbols of London and The River Thames. Well, I am given to the occasional romantic thought. The woman nearest the camera was a daily visitor. The lost picture contains her outstretched arm and shower of airborne crumbs glinting in the low winter sunshine. I see it still.

A perhaps less romantic observation is that the dockers whose cranes, so prevalent in 1964, no longer line the shores, are long gone from the scene. Five years after this photograph was taken London Docks were finally closed to shipping and sold to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, who set about redeveloping them for residential purposes. Further vast improvements to the area were, of course, undertaken for the 2012 London Olympics.

Today’s weather did not improve in the afternoon, although the storms were not as violent as they had been yesterday. We drove Flo through rain, hailstones, and darkening skies, to blink through drops running down the car windows at the home in Downton we hope to buy. In mid-afternoon it seemed like nightfall to the east whilst a golden sun pierced clouds to the west. I could even see small patches of blue sky in Jackie’s wing mirror.

This dramatic contrast was even more apparent on the beach at Milford on Sea. We went on there for Flo to give Scooby a run around on the coastal footpaths, as the choppy waves crashed on the granite rocks below the cliffs. Turner would have painted the nearer clouds to our right as the sun slowly subsided in a clear blue sky. A young man stood contemplating the scene. At the same time the lighthouse light warning of The Needles, on our left, flashed away, clearly visible against a patch of open sky beneath the untinged blanket of cloud. You will need to zoom in on the picture to see what we could see. I found it amazing that looking out across the same stretch of water, simply by changing one’s angle of view, one was seeing such differently hued cloudscapes.

Scooby trotted up and down for a bit, whilst Flo gave me the benefit of her artistic direction. It was cold, so we didn’t stay outside long enough for Jackie to get into her programme on the car radio. We then showed Flo the town and shopped in the Old Milton Tesco.

This evening Jackie fed us on succulent sausage casserole with the usual array of vegetables. I drank a glass of Trottwood 2011 shiraz, whilst Jackie’s preference was for Hoegaarden,

Wait!

Watching birds arriving at Jackie’s feeding station this morning, I was struck by the different approaches they exhibit. The tits perform an undulating swoop across the sweeping lawns, reminiscent of Ducks and Drakes. It is as if they bounce on thermals much as children’s flat stones do on still water surfaces during the game of that name. Robins pop up from anywhere. Bright yellow-billed blackbirds, perhaps too large for the feeders, patrol the surface of the box hedge beneath the containers, picking up fallen scraps. This is exactly what the pigeons do on the grass at The Firs.

After coffee I walked to Lyndhurst via Mill Lane and the A337; and back through Emery Down. Gorse, of course, flowers throughout the year, but the sunlight on a bright day such as this bestows a golden glow to the shrubs.

All around our new environment there are permanent road signs warning of queues ahead. Easily outpacing vehicles headed for Lyndhurst as early in the year as 2nd April, I received an inkling of what we will experience in the high season.

My main purpose in visiting Lyndhurst was to collect the euros for my forthcoming trip to Sigoules. The NatWest bank in the town is situated on a very dangerous corner bend. On emerging from the door of the building it is impossible to see what is coming round on the near side from your right. There is a traffic island offering some refuge for people wanting to cross here and walk up the hill that is the main street. The best approach is to wait for a gap in the stream of cars, walk to the kerb, lean forward, crane round, then nip across, hoping for the best. I had reached the nipping across stage and made it halfway to the refuge when a cry of ‘wait!’ somewhat startled me. Well, I was committed. There was no turning back. And something in the tone suggested that it was unlikely that the cry was addressed to me. As I dived onto the secure area I came face to face with our neighbours Ari and Jackie. Their little brown miniature dachshund seemed to have been rather to keen to go to the bank. Replying to Ari’s question as to my well-being, I said ‘I’m fine now I’ve got across the road. When I heard your ‘wait!’, I thought ‘what? what?’.

Before Becky, Ian, and Scooby left for Mitcham, leaving Flo to spend more time with us, we all dined on Jackie’s chicken curry followed by apricot and rhubarb crumble. I drank Kingfisher, Ian drank Peroni, and Flo drank milk.